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The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) wants to hear from you about how the Federal government can best use its resources so three of the newest and most promising technologies provide the greatest economic benefits to society.

Researchers have for the first time experimentally realised, almost a century later, an idea dating from 1912. In that year the physicist Smoluchowski devised a prototype for an engine at the molecular scale in which he thought he could ingeniously convert Brownian motion into work.

Physicists at the University of Sydney have brought silicon chips closer to performing all-optical computing and information processing that could overcome the speed limitations intrinsic to electronics, with the first report published of an on-chip all-optical temporal integrator.

A team of University of Minnesota-led researchers has cleared a major hurdle in the drive to build solar cells with potential efficiencies up to twice as high as current levels, which rarely exceed 30 percent.

Now, thanks to Lehigh University's unrivaled electron microscopy and spectroscopy facilities, researchers have gained unmatched insights that could improve the efficiency and extend the applications of the powerful nanoparticles.

Physicists at Harvard University have, for the first time, tracked individual atoms in a gas cooled to extreme temperatures as the particles reorganized into a crystal, a process driven by quantum mechanics.

Conventional solar cell efficiency could be increased from the current limit of 30 percent to more than 60 percent, suggests new research on semiconductor nanocrystals, or quantum dots, led by chemist Xiaoyang Zhu at The University of Texas at Austin.

The Citizen Alliance on the ChallEnges of Nanotechnologies (CACEN) (in French 'Alliance Citoyenne sur les Enjeux des Nanotechnologies': ACEN) has just opened a new website nano.acen-cacen.org where citizens can find and share information, questions, and analyses about societal issues raised by nanotechnologies.